


Referendum

by xngurevar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Hacking, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 10:41:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5624164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xngurevar/pseuds/xngurevar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After alcohol and friendship, the best medication that Roxy knows for relief of boredom and frustration is: leet hax.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Referendum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thephilosophah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thephilosophah/gifts).



  
"There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, than the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death. Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive. A troll who is walking and talking can be alive; or she can be lifeless. Troll Will Smith's last raps are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame; a musclebeast may be more alive, because more in tune with its own inner forces, than a troll."

— Troll John Conway

**0.**

At the center of her green cube pyramid, the sphinx sits cross-legged, holding her hands about eight inches apart. 

Cubes swiftly got boring. Pumpkins, likewise. God-tier players don’t hunger or thirst, and Roxy only considered stealing the nothingness from a handle of clear liquor for ten, fifteen seconds max before she un-stole the nothingness from that idea and dissolved it right back into the void where it belonged. 

Roxy kind of wishes some prison guards would come and interrogate her a little bit, just for the company. These old-country black chess guys remind her of her neighbors, except suddenly into hats for some reason, and not hungry for cats. 

Failing that, what other palliative measures might she conjure up? After alcohol and friendship, the best medication that Roxy knows for relief of boredom and frustration is: leet hax. 

Perhaps some sweet paper-and-pencil algorithms, to begin. Roxy hollers down the corridor for a while, hoping to sweet-talk some office supplies off a guard, but the entire Derse prison system seems to run on dadly little gray PDAs. 

Getting a hold of one of those would be perftastic, but it’s not going to happen: all the chess guys are fucking conjoined to their hardware at the wrist. Roxy has seriously watched a guard hunt and peck nonstop for a full hour, clattering in agitation, because he dipped his tie in coffee. 

But fuck it! Is this not what awesome Void powers are for? If there is any object whose physical form and theoretical properties Roxy can imagine in perfect detail, it is a computing machine. Removing the aspect of nonexistence from such an object should be no thing at all! 

Pop! An antique solar-powered pocket calculator. In the so-called light of Derse, you’d need a photovoltaic surface a yard across to run this thing. It would make a sick computation-themed coaster for a hacker’s sweaty cocktail during the times when she needs all ten of her fingers on the keyboard. Would have come in handy during those long camping trips on the far side of the Ballmer peak. Less useful now. Stop thinking about sweaty cocktails, Lalonde. 

Pop! A TI-85. Now we are cooking with gasoline. Roxy finds some primes, draws a couple sweet graphs, creates Tetris. 

Pop! A Symbolics Lisp machine. Roxy has kissed it several times and is getting ready to bring out of nothingness a power source to plug it into when her cell door slams open and the wolf girl stalks through it. 

**1.**

eep  
hello again, roxy! you may be a super advanced hacker from THE FUTURE but you seem to have quite a thing for twentieth century hardware!  
ugggh evil dog girl you again  
me again!! i could not help noticing that you have had some success with your new powers, and yet i don't see you making the spikeball i asked you for!  
yeahhhh listen bad lassie my mental powers are not going 2 hit peak spikeball capacity without hardware support  
i got to spin off some threads and such, dump some state, that kind of thing  
oh come on, you're just wasting time and playing around!  
yes well to the technologically uninitiated how would you even know teh difference  
hahaha! how indeed??  
as an omnipotent doggy girl and robotics expert, i could definitely not be expected to know the difference between vintage hardware nostalgia and something that isn't completely pointless  
oh right the robotix  
you sent jake that bunny, back before you were evil  
my evilness aside, i know exactly the value to the empire of these primitive machines, and i know that that value is precisely equal to ZERO!  
ok threaten my guts again puppy girl  
its about time 4 ur regular hourlong yap about my large n luscious intestine  
and how the lalonde bowel is the shit snausages wishes they was  
is p much like if u actually ate them, in terms of the pleasure it brings you  
i did not come here to talk about your delicious guts!  
i have an idea for a project more interesting than amassing a museum of obsolete computing devices  
i believe that you and i, together, could build...  
the matribot!

**10.**

Roxy has about a tenth of a second to appreciate the ruthless virtuosity of the nerd-sniping she has just undergone. Then, the concept “matribot” explosively decompresses inside her mind, destroying her ability to care about things other than this outrageously interesting problem, which elaborates itself so fast and in such overwhelming detail that she feels a little sick. 

This must be a common vulnerability in god-tier Void players. At its Rogue’s request, the Void departs from nonexistent things, yielding physical objects. But its access to Roxy’s mind is not exactly read-only. Ideas, which arise out of nothing, radiate from the Void in dense, high-energy rays, disrupting nearby minds. It’s fun as hell, but Roxy kind of wishes it had a dimmer switch. 

She fronts a little. 

oh come on dont be ridiculous  
the batterwitch is not gonna be fooled by a fake space egg made of tin cans and bullshit  
who said anything about fooling the batterwitch?  
she likes the idea!  
robotic subjects are in fashion or something, i wouldn't know  
her condescension's orders are to make the trollbots as "badass" as possible  
do you think you can do that roxy

But potential matribot architectures are already diagramming themselves in her head. 

hm what  
BADASS TROLLBOTS, YES OR NO  
........  
nah  
bullshit  
haha yeah  
you soldered anything up yet atoms-wise  
wanna bring it around let me grok the instruction set

**11.**

It seems that Jade’s been tinkering with prototypes for a while already. She’s built a steel case and fitted it with organic keratin horns, cultured from a variety of mysteriously sourced troll DNA samples. 

Roxy’s eyes glaze over about two minutes into Jade’s oral whitepaper on the matribot’s hardware implementation. The combined powers of Space and of the Green Sun go exponential in the context of robotics, but configurations of matter and energy are irrelevant to Roxy’s interests except insofar as they permit computation. 

While Jade talks and projects schematics on empty space, Roxy makes appropriately timed go-on noises and a very serious, attention-paying face. Meanwhile, she throws up shields of Void that cloak most of what Jade is saying, so she can concentrate on the things she has to know to build the kernel. Once she’s got something to boot the matribot into, she can forget about the hardware forever. 

This will require coffee. 

blah blah blah blah blah clock cycle blah blah blah blah register blah blah blah control stack blah blah blah garbage collection blah blah blah blah  
hey  
blah blah blah distortions in the blah blah blah blah blah parasitic capacitance blah blah blah blah blah electron-pushers blah blah blah  
hey jade  
blah blah blah sinusoidal blah blah blah blah blah blah cavity resonator blah blah blah  
PSST  
wurrr ruff!  
sorry!  
uh,   
u think there's any coffee in this jail  
guards maybe got some stewing on the hot plate  
six hours old, texture of an oil slick, cooked on down to pure essence of caffeine  
cmon doesn't that sound like a kick in the pants for a brain in a head  
password!  
wut  
give the password to the coffee!!  
uh, woof  
no  
um... grr  
no! you have one attempt remaining  
FUCK  
may i please have some coffee  
yes, you may  
(phew)  
study this figure until i return

**100.**

Jade’s visual aid seems to involve vacuum tubes. Roxy uses it as a place to rest her eyes while she imagines all the matribot’s instars. 

The spikeball is going to have to hatch into an artificial mother grub, then build a bunch of grub-bots that pupate into trollbots. Self-construction and energy I/O are implemented in hardware, freeing Roxy up to approach the higher abstraction levels. 

Mature trollbots will form a distributed network of autonomous nodes, each running a unique yet compatible variation on a common kernel. There will be no significant difference between a trollbot and a troll, except for the boring details of the hardware substrate. 

In terms of handing a race of sentient beings over to the Batterwitch just to save one’s own guts, the matribot is no improvement over an organic matriorb. But the robot version’s better because Roxy writes the code. 

It’s not immediately obvious how to exploit this advantage. Roxy knows exactly where she’d swap out the Condesce’s key fingerprint for her own, but usurping the throne isn’t the same as destroying the monarchy. 

The problem is that Alternian society’s large-scale structures aren’t specified anywhere in the source code. They arise nondeterministically out of the accumulated interactions of billions of elements. On this chaotic system, Roxy’s only lever is the set of shared axioms on which the trollbots base their computations. Tweaking those axioms to produce some other political system instead of the Alternian Empire is a hard fucking problem in sociopolitical metaprogramming. 

Further research will be necessary. 

The smell of fresh coffee breaks Roxy’s concentration. She notices that she feels drunk with insight. Jade seems to have been and gone; a coffee-maker burbles in a niche of the pyramid. 

Roxy withdraws to the inner sanctum, where her pink laptop is already waiting for her with a “matribot prototype specs!!!” folder on the desktop. She cracks her knuckles, slurps her coffee, and starts to type. 

**101.**

The first prototype blows itself to smithereens five events into the boot sequence. Jade crushes the explosion down to firecracker-size, but Roxy’s pyramid gets ruined. 

UNCOOL you bitch  
seriously wtf  
wt FUCKIN f  
i told you it was an ~ath machine!  
who do you think i fuckin am  
ur god damn right its an ~ath machine and im the frickin god emperor of ~ath galaxy  
computers do not get their fireworks on in meatspace unless i the fuck tell them to!  
those were virtual ~ath machines emulated on earth computers, silly  
this prototype implements the ~ath interpreter in hardware  
why the FUCK would you do that  
welcome to the alternian empire, roxy  
i'm sorry if our computers are too explosive for you  
(fu)  
but consider that the self-termination payload is actually a safety measure!  
if the interpreter doesn't find a local explosive device, it falls back on the nearest doomsday machine in its routing hierarchy  
trust me, it's way easier to clean up a dead robot than a smashed planet!  
that is  
so stupoid  
well, print your own circuits if you think you can do better  
ok look, i aint working on a box that explodes every time it crashes  
the rule of my science: crash early crash often  
ur gonna have 2 pony up a virtual machine  
that means processors, harley  
im sure you can scare up some cpus  
if i was an alternian cpu i'd be scared out of my fucknig mind  
we will see what we can do  
ok now gtfo outta here so i can fix my goddamn brain chi lair   
i'm sorry about your code pyramid!  
is not a fucking code pyramid its my fuckin chakra palace  
um ok.....  
there, i fixed it!  
now you can GET BACK TO WORK  
fuckoff ty

**110.**

i don't know, this just seems like a really bad idea!!!  
I am a provably correct artificial intelligence with more processing power than the sum of all human brains that have ever existed. I anticipate no risk whatsoever in allocating a tiny fraction of my computing resources for the use of a factory-standard teenage girl.  
no you're right, that sounds like a totally safe plan that will not get us hacked even a little bit  
I'm glad you agree.

They give her a sandbox on Janey. Roxy has to admire the hubris. Earth used to give prizes at conventions for whoever could wreck this type of shit the fastest. But olde tyme Earth hackers didn’t have to worry about a syntax error exploding their bffsy’s head. 

The evil supercomputer with which Janey’s mind has involuntarily fused is a sweet piece of machinery to have access to even a fraction of. It’s upsettingly fast: every time a command finishes before the Enter key has even sprung all the way back up, Roxy’s nerves take a hit. Finally she chokes the scheduling priority down to insanely crippled levels, just to get back the feeling that actual computation is occurring. 

Poised so near the Void’s event horizon, Roxy experiences no shortage of wild ideas for alien system software design. She doesn’t bother curating, she just applies a rough fuck-yeah filter and trashes everything else. 

Bolting fuck-yeahs together, she builds a virtual matribot emulator and a kernel to run on it. Then she gets it started simulating sociopolitical outcomes for small random variations on the matribot’s axioms. 

Having a shell on Janey is almost like being able to talk to her, sort of. Roxy knows this emotion is hella fake: executing code on an isolated subset of Jane’s hardware totally fails to mean that any actual communication is taking place. The whole point of the sandbox is to hook Roxy up with some of Janey’s petaflops while preventing her from affecting Jane’s consciousness in any way. 

What is not a fake emotion is an adorable little backdoor Roxy knows is lying around Janey’s namespace somewhere. 

It dates from when they were eight. Jane loved Roxy less then, but she trusted her more. Of course she’d give her pesterfriend a root shell on her wriggling day present, if only to show off its highly proprietary features. Even then, Roxy was a practical and results-oriented girl who would not have let any misguided scruples stop her from ruthlessly owning her bffsy’s sinister corporate mind-control device, given half a chance. 

While her simulations thrash, Roxy feels around in the sandbox’s gritty depths. Down there somewhere among the ossified turds, her old backdoor extends a compliant knob, ready to roll out a fat welcome mat in the shape of a four-eyed pink kitty cat. 

There it is. It glows pale pink among an army of Crocker-red devices. Roxy gets the fuck out of there before some watchdog process sees her executing weird directories. 

She’ll have to come heavy to expel the rogue Crockertech. Careful to keep her files cryptically named, her variable names randomly chosen, and her code totally comment-free, Roxy builds out the matribot’s OS. And also, in parallel, heavily obfuscated, a patch for Jane. 

**111.**

Among the cell’s gloomy purple shadows, the matribot’s horns shine the color of Earth’s sun in its youth. Its smooth gray surface could be living chitin, though Roxy knows it’s just sheet metal. Until it boots the operating system she’s made for it, it wouldn’t even make a good doorstop. Too pointy. 

It rotates slowly between Roxy’s palms, suspended in the preview aspect of her inventory modus. The horns’ glow picks out the delicate rivets of the case. 

Roxy didn’t see why there had to be rivets, but Jade had looked at her with deep reproachful eyes when she’d said so. Skeuomorphic aesthetics were strictly a Space issue, so Roxy’s opinion wouldn’t have counted against the rivets even if she weren’t incarcerated and collaborating under duress. 

Jade pants and smiles and occasionally thumps her tail. 

Roxy’s software has passed its whole test suite on every virtual matribot she’s emulated, but she hasn’t booted it on bare metal. Now the moment has come. If the boot sequence chokes, it’ll probably explode again. 

Roxy crosses a couple of pairs of fingers and nods at Jade. Jade looks at the matribot and blinks her eyes slowly, once. A soft click comes from the matribot’s insides, and the horns’ glow intensifies. The matribot vibrates quietly, giving off a steady, near-subsonic hum. 

Roxy reaches for her laptop, uncrosses the necessary fingers, and pings the matribot: it replies. She requests its status: ready. 

Jade executes a controlled frisk. 

demo time!!!

**1000.**

Out in Jade’s electronics workshop, a space barnacle stuck to the translunar chain, Jane regards the softly humming matribot. 

This artifact is a crude, mechanical approximation. I will improve it.

She winds up, and her right hand catches on fire. Jade yelps, but Jane ignores her and pitches a fistful of Life magic at the matribot, which goes up in blowtorch-colored flame. Jane shakes out her fingers and bleeps once. 

Inside Roxy’s pyramid, a terminal goes insane. Roxy rolls over, opens one eye, and paws at the keyboard until the beeping quits. Text scrolls by, too fast to read. 

She hits a couple more keys and eats a double pupilful of cyan from the blinky-lights screen. Cyan isn’t even a real status indicator. Lolwut. Time to fire up a REPL and interrogate the haps. 

**1001.**

Roxy barely recognizes the system she made. Everything’s been rewritten. 

All her obfuscations remain; the cryptic names, familiar now, still mean roughly what they always did. But the underlying structure has been broken apart and remade, clearing away every dirty hack and half-assed kludge. All the components of the matribot’s hardware apparatus and operating system now interlock as deeply and smoothly as the joints of an animal’s skeleton. Every part, as whole as a bone, takes its form from the larger whole it nests inside. 

The matribot’s original software composed elements of oblivion and chaos: the Void’s obscure genius; Roxy’s entropic names and hidden purposes; ~ATH semantics, anchored in death. But now, out of the same elements, an intricate order arises, arrayed in complex symmetries, convex and simple as an egg. Every hierarchy cuts a series of golden sections. Even ~ATH’s retina-scrambling syntax has been made to _rhyme_ and _scan_. Waves of structure-preserving transformations ripple through the system even as Roxy reads the source. 

**1010.**

Roxy’s brain feels like a piece of cracked sidewalk that several young plants are forcing their way through. As she scrolls through the matribot’s new code, she keeps having to remember to re-close her mouth. 

She forgets about mouth-closure for good when she sees what’s happened to her ill Janey hacks. 

Those codes were all jumbled up together with the matribot OS, for flummoxing purposes. The two projects shared a bunch of libraries anyway; it had turned out that running a race of robotic trolls and controlling a distributed superintelligence were pretty much isomorphic problems. 

Now the Janey hack is fucked up in the same bizarre way as the matribot itself. It’s no longer a machine for destroying another machine’s control over Janey’s mind. Roxy isn’t sure _what_ it is, anymore. She’s still staring at it when two trilbied guards come to haul her before the Empress. 

**1011.**

The Condesce slouches on her throne, one hand stroking Jade’s ears. Crouched at her side, her chin on the hag’s knee, Jade tracks Roxy with her eyes. Jane stands to the right, the matribot floating by her shoulder. The rivets glint in its new blue glow. 

Pisces pulses on the Condesce’s forehead, its unmatched close parenthesis a glaring syntax error. It’s fucking wrong and Roxy hates it. Then it occurs to her that the parentheses match if and only if they enclose the entire universe. Oh man. Oh man. Roxy wriggles her shoulders in disgust. The imperial grin flashes. 

nice work gurl  
deeply appreciate  
now we got a special ceremony we do  
any time an engineer builds us somefin reel sweet  
jane baby you wanna do the honors

Jane equips her Skaiafork. The guards hang on to Roxy’s elbows while Jane paces down the aisle toward her, her mouth set in a flat line, her black eyes empty. 

SUBMIT.

It seems that the time has come. Roxy slumps into the guards’ grip, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. 

She gives a long complicated whistle, high and sweet, clear as water in the still air. A modulating flutter perturbs its flow. Jade pins her ears and growls. 

Jane makes a dying-hard-drive click-twang and pauses in mid-stride. 

Roxy finishes whistling and opens her eyes. 

With a crackling boom, an arc of static electricity discharges between the matribot and Jane’s tiara. Then a sudden gust of blue fire swallows Jane whole. 

Through the guttering blaze, the first thing Roxy sees is the pale green Life symbol set in the sky-blue tiara on Jane’s brow. 

Then, the buck teeth of Jane’s little smile. Life, green as a new blade, all over Jane’s cerulean front. Jane’s blue eyes behind her glasses, framed in the fine electric-blue traceries of her circuits. 

omfg  
you look fuckin amazing janeycakes

**1100.**

Jade leaps to her feet and shouts, with crisp human consonants and an animal’s raw vowels: 

BARK  
BARK BARK BARK

The Condesce stands up slowly, flicking her fingertips at Jade, who subsides into agitated whining. Then, her voice deep and cold as a trench: 

whale, whale  
we would not a thought  
you could boatstrap imperial power  
on a earth human chassis  
but the sad fact is, bitches  
you try and fork the empire  
you the one gonna end up forked  
heiress

Jane turns to face the witch, a tiny blue pilot light shining against a writhing black shadow. The Condesce’s teeth and her symbol shine in her shadowed face as she beckons. 

we doin this now  
.  
(janey kill dash nine)

**1101.**

The Maid flourishes her fork. Blue sparks leap from the tines. 

The Empress arms herself, swinging her trident out to arm’s length with a heavy swoosh that makes her hair ripple and snap. Her tiara’s symbol flickers, darkens, and changes: ram’s horns, in deep rust red. Tendrils of mist stream from the new symbol, gathering in thick clouds that condense into a foggy throng of ghosts. A forest of pale horn-shapes rises from their blurry heads. 

They drift forward alongside the Condesce as she advances. Their vague faces, dark spots for eyes and mouths, all turn toward Jane. 

The Condesce breaks into a rapid, flowing run. She raises her fork overhead as she comes on, silent, grinning, her hair whipping out behind her. The ghosts surge around her, then ahead of her, rushing for Jane. 

Jane braces herself against the oncoming wave of ghosts, which breaks and roils around her as the Condesce’s passing blow clashes off the Skaiafork’s haft. Hurled past Jane by the crushing momentum of her charge, the Condesce leaps and hangs in the air, psionics crackling. Her hair furls around her ankles as she revolves. 

The ghosts rise up around Jane in a towering swarm. They flare up high above her head, then collapse inward, thinning out and layering themselves over her, forming a laminated armor, lusus-white. When Jane turns to face the Condesce, they glow bright white and cling so closely that they and she together take a single form. 

The Condesce isn’t smiling anymore. She touches the Aries symbol still smoldering on her forehead. Then she lifts her chin and spreads her arms. 

The Jane-shaped body of ghosts lashes out with spectrally amplified force, the long arc from Jane’s throwing hand to her planted heel glazed with the spirits of the dead. The Skaiafork scorches the air with the speed of its passing and pins the Condesce to the far wall. The wind of its flight blows back Roxy’s hair. 

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Jade’s long wail lasts while the Condesce dies. Jane’s ghosts fall away, one by one, as she watches her predecessor go. After the fuchsia blood stops flowing and the heavy horns drag down the head, the Condesce’s tiara goes dark. The ghosts, saluting, fade. 

Jade falls silent, hiccups, and looks around. The malignant light in her eyes has gone out; her face is tear-stained but paper-white. 

Jane turns. The guards let go of Roxy and change status to BOWING. 

**1110.**

The former Empress lies in state while her last subjects, in their finest hats, pay their silent respects. Then they launch her remains toward the timeless embrace of the tentacles of her great-aunts in the Furthest Ring. 

When the new star that is the meteor appears off the shoulder of Skaia, Derse throws it a parade. Cake is served. 

**Author's Note:**

> Main ripoff victim: Christopher Alexander.
> 
> Thank you nice betas stclairvoyant and Graceful Architect.


End file.
